How I Learned That I Could Push the Button Memoir by Jerome Gold ISBN 978-930773-670

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These memoirs compose a compact history of the effects of the American war in Vietnam on the author.  Colored by the effects of one war, they portray some of the ways in which we have looked at later events and at one another between these events.  Certain themes arise again and again - the perceived threat presented by the other, the permeability of borders that separate like from other, the tension between loyalty to one's fellows and obligation to the greater entity that we call nation or country or society, the distrust of abstraction and of those who use abstraction to manipulate others.

Drawing on the author's direct experience of one war and his peripheral experience of another, How I Learned That I Could Push The Button may be considered a companion to Jerome Gold's acclaimed novel Sergeant Dickinson.  They reveal Sergeant Dickinson as he might have been in the decades following the conclusion of that book. 

How I Learned That I Could Push The Button is the personal memoir of Jerome Gold and drawn directly from his experiences in the Vietnam War. Discussing the issues of perceived vs. actual threat, loyalty, obligation, how abstraction is used to manipulate others, and the brutal and terrible side to war itself, How I Learned That I Could Push The Button is a very sober recounting of a troubled and hazardous time. Also serving as a companion to the Jerome Gold's novel, "Sergeant Dickinson", How I Learned That I Could Push The Button deftly explores how the fictional Sergeant Dickinson might have lived and been in the decades following that novel's conclusion.

                -- Midwest Book Review, January 17, 2004

About Sergeant Dickinson: 

"[R]anks with Short Timers and Dispatches."

                -- Kirkus Reviews

"Belongs on the high, narrow shelf of first-rate fiction about battlefield experience."

               -- The New York Times Book Review

"Gold has shaped a powerful, merciless novel . . . ."

                -- Booklist

"[A] compelling portrait of a soldier entangled in the ruinous affliction of violence and guilt that is both moving and disturbing."

                -- The Bloomsbury Review